Living with severe chronic pain, or forgetting the name of the person I’m interviewing.
Vanity Fair, The Proust Questionnaire, Vanity Fair, September 2012 source ↗
The question
What do you fear most?Originally asked
Vanity Fair, to its interview subject, The Proust Questionnaire
The exact prompt is fixed in Vanity Fair's Proust Questionnaire and independently sustained in The Guardian's The Q&A over multiple decades.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
Others on this question
View all 256 →
Chiwetel Ejiofor
English actor
It’s actually people knowing how fearful I am.
Being on a plane that is about to crash.
To be stuck in the past.
Rita Wilson
American actress, singer, and producer
Losing my memory. My mom had Alzheimer’s disease, and I never ever want to have that decline.
More from Terry Gross
View profile →Swiftly, painlessly, and old.
A glass of wine, a good dinner with my husband, and a day ahead of me without a deadline is close enough.
Their willingness to put up with my endless explanations about why I can’t see them because I’m under deadline.
The inability to stop talking about themselves when they’re not being interviewed.
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